


^ ' ' ' jk4i^^ "^^ 











Hollinger Corp. 
pH8.5 



Address 

by 

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT 



Before the Washington Association of New Jersey, 

at Morristown, New Jersey, Monday, 

February 22nd, 1915 



Sent out with the Compliments of George H. Paine, Philadelphia, Pa. 



By transfer 
The White House 






ADDRESS OF WILLIAM H. TAFT BEFORE 
THE WASHINGTON ASSOCIATION OF NEW 
JERSEY, AT MORRISTOWN, NEW JERSEY, 
FEBRUARY 22, 191 5. 

Gentlemen of the Washington Association of New Jersey: 

Washington's life and service related to many phases 
and problems in our national life, and his views, set forth 
in his correspondence, in his messages, and expressed in his 
executive acts, are broad and comprehensive. No issue or 
problem of national importance presses on a birthday of his, 
the solution of which may not be greatly aided by a recur- 
rence to principles which he practiced and sought to inculcate 
in his fellow countrymen. 

I do not intend today to dwell on the indispensable 
character of the service that he rendered to the country in 
winning Independence and in the framing and ratification 
of the Constitution. Under the inspiration of these historic 
surroundings where Washington lived many trying days 
and weeks and months of the Revolutionaiy struggle, you 
have familiarized yourselves with his life. In this presence, 
it would be a work of supererogation for any one, though 
much more a student of his career than I am, to review it. 

After Independence was won and the Constitution was 
adopted, there still remained to this country a fateful period 
in which the Ship of State was to be launched, national 
sovereignty was to be enforced, and that Independence, 
which had been nominally granted and secured, was to be in 
fact established among the nations of the world. 

I pass by the achievement of national organization 
under the guidance of Washington, assisted by the genius 
of Hamilton and Madison, before Jefferson entered the 
Cabinet. I do not discuss the birth of national credit under 
the financial measures pressed upon Congress by Hamilton 
and secured ultimately through the co-operation of Jefferson. 



This 183rd anniversary of Washington's birth, in view of 
the present critical condition in our International Relations, 
should bring to our minds the third great achievement of his 
Presidential tenn, the maintenance of a policy of neutrality 
through a general European War. He insisted upon it as 
necessary before he became President; he maintained it 
throughout his official life as President against mighty odds 
and under conditions that tried his soul, and in his Farewell 
Address, he restated it and reinforced it as a legacy to the 
American people. 

He began his first Administration at the time of the 
outbreak of the French Revolution. The progress of that 
great popular uprising, with all its excesses and the wars 
that grew out of it, was reflected in American politics of 
that day in a way that makes the currents in our popular 
opinion today due to the existing European War, seem 
negligible. France had been our friend, when we needed a 
friend, in the Revolutionary War. The French people were 
engaged in destroying the divine right of kings, and sub- 
stituting therefor popular rule. They were encountering 
monarchical intervention to restore the old system. Nothing 
was better calculated to awaken the patriotic and friendly 
sympathy of this country, in whose memory the struggles of 
the Revolution were still fresh. The appeals which the 
French Republic, through the Ministers which it had sent 
here. Genet, Fauchet and Adet, fell upon grateful and 
responsive hearts and aroused an anxiety to help this 
struggle of our friend for liberty in Europe. Moreover, our 
obligations to France under the Treaty of 1778 seemed to 
require us to favor her as a belligerent in her war with 
England. The intriguing and plotting of the French Min- 
isters to use the United States as a basis of operations 
against England greatly complicated the problem which 
Washington had to face in avoiding an English war. More- 
over, the utter fatuousness of much of the English policy in 
seizing American merchantmen without warning and in 
stirring up Indian outrages against our Western settlers 



roused American feeling against that country to the highest 
pitch. 

In the teeth of marked British insolence, Washington 
sent Jay to England to make the treaty which bore his name. 
The flamboyant blundering and partisanship of Monroe as 
Minister to France, while the treaty was being negotiated 
in England, leading to his recall, and the apparent desertion 
of Washington by Federalists as well as Republicans when 
he signed the treaty, and the subsequent change of public 
opinion when the foreign French intrigue against the treaty 
became known, and when, in spite of its many defects, the 
benefits of the treaty were seen by the country, constitute a 
train of events in the successful maintenance of neutrality 
which proves it to be more completely and exclusively Wash- 
ington's own, and more fully due to his personal foresight, 
his personal courage and his personal influence than any 
other achievement of his career. 

In the Revolutionary War, of course he was the leader, 
but there were many others who shared with him the 
responsibility. In the framing of the Constitution, in the 
organization of our government, and in our financial policy, 
Hamilton and Madison and others played a large part. 
Washington sat as an arbitrator in many of these issues 
which were presented to him in the opposing arguments of 
his associates. As Jefferson said : 

"During the administration of our first President, 
his Cabinet of four members was equally divided by 
as marked an opposition of principle as monarchism 
and republicanism could bring into conflict. Had that 
Cabinet been a (French) directory, like positive and 
negative quantities in algebra, the opposing wills would 
have balanced each other and produced a state of abso- 
lute inaction. But the President heard with calmness 
the opinion and reasons of each, decided the course to 
be pursued, and kept the government steadily in it, un- 
affected by the agitation. The public knew well the 



dissensions of the Cabinet, but never had an uneasy- 
thought on their account, because they knew also they 
had provided a regulating power which would keep the 
machine in steady movement." 

But the policy of Neutrality was Washington's alone. 
He initiated it. He enforced it. He bequeathed it to his 
countrymen. Before he had been chosen President he 
wrote as follows : 

"I hope the United States of America will be able 
to keep disengaged from the labyrinth of European 
politics and wars ; and that before long they will, by the 
adoption of a good national government, have become 
respectable in the eyes of the world. ... It should 
be the policy of the United States to administer to their 
wants without being engaged in their quarrels." 

A year after he went into the Presidency he wrote to 
Lafayette that we were : 

"Gradually recovering from the distresses in which 
the war left us, patiently advancing in our task of civil 
government, unentangled in the crooked politics of 
Europe." 

In March, 1793, Washington said: 

"All our late accounts from Europe hold up the 
expectation of a general war in that quarter. For the 
sake of humanity, I hope that such an event will not 
take place. But if it should, I trust that we shall have 
too just a sense of our own interest to originate any 
cause that may involve us in it." 

Again on March 12, 1793, he wrote to Jefiferson: 

"War having actually commenced between France 
and Great Britain, it behooves the government of this 
country to use every means in its power to prevent the 



citizens thereof from embroiling us with either of those 
powers, by endeavoring to maintain a strict neutrality. 
I therefore require that you will give the subject mature 
consideration, that such measures as shall be deemed 
most likely to effect this desirable purpose may be 
adopted without delay." 

On the 2nd of April, 1793, he issued a proclamation of 
neutrality. It must be realized too that this proclamation 
of neutrality was very difficult to reconcile with the engage- 
ments of the United States under the treaty of France made 
during the Revolutionary War, and it was possible qnlx to 
escape them .on the plea that they were not binding on the 
United States in the case of an offensive war such as France 
was waging against England. Finally, after his course of 
neutrality had been vindicated and he came to lay his office 
down, he appealed to the American people not to depart 
from it. He said in his Farewell Address : 

"The great rule of conduct for us in regard to 
foreign Nations, is, in extending our commercial rela- 
tions, to have with them as little political connexion as 
possible. So far as we have already formed engage- 
ments, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. 
Here let us stop. 

"Europe has a set of primary interests, which to 
us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must 
be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of 
which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence 
therefore it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, 
by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her poli- 
tics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her 
friendships, or enmities. 

"Our detached and distant situation invites and 
enables us to pursue a different course. 

"Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situa- 
tion? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign 



8 

ground ? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that 
of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and pros- 
perity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, 
interest, humour, or caprice?" 

It seems to me that this is a good text from which to 
preach a sermon and draw a lesson on this Washington's 
birthday, when most of the great powers of Europe are 
again at war. 

We have among our citizens many who look back to 
the country of one or another of the belligerents as their 
native land. The natural result has followed that the bitter- 
ness of the contest is reflected in the conflicting sympathies 
of our people. The newspapers of no other country have 
been as full of details of the war and of the circumstances 
leading to it as our own press. This has stimulated public 
interest and created partisans who attack President Wilson 
because he has been faithfully following the example set, 
and the admonitions given, by our first President. No better 
evidence of this could be had than that, from time to time, 
first one side and then the other criticises the Administration 
for its partiality, its lame acquiescence, or its unfair protests. 
So extreme have some of these partisans become that they 
propose to organize a political party and take political action, 
to be based on issues arising out of the present war; to 
ignore altogether the questions germane to American 
domestic politics, and to visit all candidates in future elec- 
tions who do not subscribe to their factional international 
views, with political punishment. I am far from saying 
that an unwise or an unpatriotic course in our foreign rela- 
tions may not justify criticism of an administration and may 
not require its condemnation at the appropriate election, but 
in such a case the reasons must be found in injury to the 
interests of the United States, and not in the merits of the 
issues being fought out by European nations in an European 
arena. 



I was asked in Canada recently whether the war would 
affect our politics, so as to divide parties on European lines. 
I answered unhesitatingly in the negative. I said that to 
inject European issues into American politics had uniformly 
meant the defeat of those who attempted it. There is no bet- 
ter proof of this than the revulsion of feeling against the Re- 
publican party in the latter part of Washington's second 
term, when the people suspected it of making the cause of the 
French Revolution more important than the safety and 
prosperity of the United States. The country rallied to 
Washington's support and his maintenance of American 
interests only a short time after he had signed the most 
unpopular treaty ever negotiated in our history. 

Legislation is pressed to forbid the sale of arms and 
ammunition by our merchants in trade to belligerents. It 
happens that one party to the war is fully prepared with 
ammunition and arms. It happens that the other party is 
not. It happens that the party which is prepared with 
ammunition and arms is excluded from the seas by the 
navies of their opponents. It happens therefore that the 
only sale of ammunition and arms that can take place is to 
one side. Therefore it is said that as the side to which we 
are selling arms and ammunition is more or less dependent 
on our sales, we should place an embargo on that trade, 
force that side to peace, and bring the war to an end. It has 
always been a rule of international law that neutral coun- 
tries may sell arms and ammunition to either belligerent but 
that such articles are absolute contraband and liable to con- 
fiscation on board a neutral vessel. We have proceeded on 
this assumption and our manufacturers have sold arms and 
ammunition to those belligerents who would buy. We do 
not discriminate between the belligerents in the matter of 
furnishing war material. It is only that the fortune of war 
and the circumstances, over which we have no control, pre- 
vent one side from purchasing in our markets which are 
open to all who can reach them. Nor is it possible to see 



lO 

why the doing of that which neutrals in all wars have been 
permitted to do should be made unneutral by such circum- 
stances. The change of the well-established rule, however, 
where such a change would inure only to the benefit of one 
of the parties might well be regarded as unneutral, as has 
been pointed out by the President. Neutrality leagues, there- 
fore, that are organized to press legislation in the nature of 
an embargo on the sale of arms and ammunition do not seem 
to be rightly named. 

But my chief objection to giving up the lawful and 
usual course of a neutral to sell arms and ammunition to 
belligerents is ba§ed on the highest National interest. We 
are a country which is never likely to be fully prepared for 
war. We must have the means of preparing as rapidly as 
possible after war is imminent and inevitable. We would 
be most foolish to adopt a policy of refusing to sell arms and 
ammunition to belligerent powers which if it was pursued 
against us when we were driven into war, would leave us 
helpless. In our Spanish War we were obliged to purchase 
ships and other equipments for war from foreign countries, 
and in any future war, we would be in the same position. 

More than this, if we were to place an embargo on the 
sale of arms and ammunition to belligerents, we would dis- 
courage the industry in this country and reduce substantially 
our possible domestic means of preparing for future wars. 
It has long been the policy and the wise policy of the War 
Department not to be dependent for its supplies on govern- 
ment factories alone, but to encourage private enterprise in 
this line of manufacture, in order that, should national 
exigency arise, we could depend on aid from private sources. 
To deny to the owners of such investments the opportunities 
of trade with belligerents would be to discourage them and 
make our preparedness to resist unjust aggression even less 
than it now is. 

Finally, the general adoption of a course by neutrals 
not to sell arms to the belligerents in a war, would greatly 



II 

stimulate the tendency to increase armaments in time of 
peace to be ready for war. Such a stimulus to greater arma- 
ments we should all deplore, because of their burden upon 
the peoples of the countries affected, and because of the 
temptation to war involved in their maintenance. 

Another criticism against the Administration comes not 
only from those whose predilections are based on their 
European origin, but also from native Americans who are 
aroused by what they conceive to be the possible evil world 
consequences of this war and the merits of its issues. They 
complain of the Administration because it did not protest 
against every violation of international law committed by 
one set of the belligerents against the other. This view 
was made to depend at first upon what was thought to be a 
treaty obligation on the part of the United States to protest, 
growing out of the provisions of The Hague treaties, to 
which most of the belligerents together with the United 
States have been signatories. Further examination, I think, 
showed that most of these treaties were by their own terms 
inoperative, because they had not been signed by all the bel- 
ligerents. While the people of the United States might well 
maintain the wisdom and righteousness of such provisions, 
or deplore their violation, their government was not under 
any treaty obligation to take part in the controversy, to 
express an opinion, or to register a protest. 
• " It must be noted that in every war one side must be 
wrong, and frequently both sides are wrong. Frequently 
both sides violate international law and the laws of war 
against each other. It is most difficult for a neutral to learn 
all the facts in such a way as to reach a safe and certain 
judgment on the merits. Moreover, even if this is possible, 
it has been the policy of our government since its establish- 
ment to decline to enter the European arena of war in any 
capacity, and our obligation to take sides in a 
European war and enter a protest must be exceedingly 
clear before we should permit ourselves to do so. 
When an issue made is being fought by millions of 



12 

men on one side and by millions of men on another, a neutral 
nation which fails to protest against violations of the laws 
of war as between belligerents cannot be said to acquiesce in 
those violations or to recognize them in any way as a 
precedent which will embarrass it. We must realize that in 
a controversy like this, where the whole life-blood of each 
contestant is being poured out, and in which its very exist- 
ence as a nation is at stake, protests like those proposed in 
respect of issues in which a neutral is not directly interested, 
may well seem to the highly sensitive peoples engaged a 
formal declaration of sympathy in the war with one side or 
the other. This must inevitably and materially injure our 
attitude of neutrality, without accomplishing any good. 
Therefore, while I sympathize with the Belgians in this war, 
whose country, without any fault of theirs, has been made 
its bloody center, I approve and commend to the full the 
attitude of President Wilson in declining to consider the 
evidence brought before him in respect to alleged atrocities 
in Belgium, and to express an opinion on the issues pre- 
sented. A similar decision with respect to the application 
of the German Government to have him investigate the 
evidence of the use of dum diim bullets was equally sound. 
We are not sitting as judges of issues between countries in 
Europe in this great war. We are seeking to maintain strict 
neutrality, and until our decision is invoked, with an agree- 
ment to abide by our judgment, and recommendation for 
settlement, we need not embroil ourselves by official expres- 
sions of criticism or approval of the acts of the participants 
in the war. This is not only the wisest course for us to 
pursue in maintaining an attitude that may give us influence 
in promoting mediation when mediation is possible, but it 
will help us to avoid being drawn into the war. 

It is said that we show ourselves utterly selfish and 
commercial when we refuse to protest against a breach of 
the laws of war by one belligerent against another, and yet 
register protest against the violation of our neutral trade 
rights. Thus our critics say we exalt our pockets above 



13 

principle. This is a confusion of ideas. When the action 
of a belHgerent directly affects our commercial interests, 
then we must protest or acquiesce in the wrong. When the 
wrong is not committed against us, but against a European 
nation in a European quarrel, absence of protest by us is 
not acquiescence by us, but only consistent maintenance of 
our National Policy to avoid European quarrels. Not only 
was this the rule laid down by Washington, but it has found 
authoritative expression in the reservation made in the treaty 
between the United States, Germany, Austria-Hungary, 
Belgium, Spain, France, Great Britain, Italy, The Nether- 
lands, Portugal, Russia and Sweden known as the Treaty 
of Algeciras, proclaimed January 22, 1907. The reservation 
was as follows: 

"As a part of this act of ratification, the Senate 
understands that the participation of the United States 
in the Algeciras Conference, and in the formulation 
and adoption of the General Act and Protocol which 
resulted therefrom, was with the sole purpose of pre- 
serving and increasing its commerce in Morocco, the 
protection as to life, liberty and property of its citizens 
residing or traveling therein, and of aiding by its 
friendly offices and efforts in removing friction and 
controversy which seemed to menace the peace between 
the powers signatory with the United States to the 
treaty of 1880, all of which are on terms of amity with 
this government; and without purpose to depart from 
the traditional American foreign policy which forbids 
participation by the United States in the settlement of 
political questions which are entirely European in their 
scope." 

It is noteworthy that this reservation was proposed by 
the Senate and approved and signed by President Roosevelt 
in the same years in which the Hague Treaties were signed. 
It throws light on the attitude we proposed to take in respect 
of breaches of those treaties committed by one European 
nation against another. 



14 

Our interest in the present war, therefore, under the 
conditions that exist, should be limited as set forth in this 
reservation, to preserving and increasing the commerce of 
the United States with the belligerents, to the protection as 
to life, liberty and property of our citizens residing or trav- 
eling in their countries, and to the aiding by our friendly 
offices and efforts in bringing those countries to peace. 

Our efforts for peace have been made as complete as 
possible, for the President has already tendered his good 
offices by way of mediation between the powers, and they 
have not been accepted. 

In preserving the commerce of the United States with 
the belligerents, however, we are face to face with a crisis. 
We are threatened with a serious invasion of our rights as 
neutrals in trading with the belligerent countries. What 
certainly is an innovation upon previous rules in respect to 
neutral commerce and contraband of war has been initiated 
by belligerents of both sides. The planting of mines in the 
open sea and the use of submarines to send neutral vessels 
to the bottom without inquiry as to their neutrality when 
found in a so-called war zone of the open sea, are all of 
them a variation from the rules of international law gov- 
erning the action of belligerents towards neutral trade. 
When their violation results in the destruction of the lives 
of American citizens, or of American property, a grave 
issue will arise as to what the duty of this government is. 
The responsibility of the President and Congress in meeting 
the critical issue thus presented in maintaining our national 
rights, and our national honor on the one hand, with due 
regard to the awful consequences to our 90,000,000 of 
people, of engaging in this horrible world war, on the other, 
will be very great. It involves on their part a judgment so 
momentous in its consequences that we should earnestly pray 
that the necessity for it may be averted. If, however, the 
occasion arises, we can be confident that those in authority 
will be actuated by the highest patriotic motives and by the 



15 

deepest concern for our national welfare. We must not 
allow our pride or momentary passion to influence our judg- 
ment. We must exercise the deliberation that the fateful 
consequences in the loss of our best blood and enormous 
waste of treasure would necessarily impose upon us. We 
must allow no jingo spirit to prevail. We must abide 
the judgment of those to whom we have entrusted the 
authority, and when the President shall act, we must stand 
by him to the end. In this determination we may be sure 
that all will join, no matter what their previous views, no 
matter what their European origin. All will forget their 
differences in self-sacrificing loyalty to our common flag 
and our common country. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



020 914 137 1 



Hollin; 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



020 914 137 1 



